Petoskey Middle School robotics team heads to world championship

Petoskey will be 1 of only 2 middle school teams competing

At next week's world robotics competition, Petoskey Middle School students suspect more than a few eyes will be on them.

And there's a pretty good reason for that. Out of 12,000 students who will attend the competition, only they and one other team will be middle schoolers. The rest of competitors? All high schoolers.

"We're probably going to be watched more by the judges because we're one of only two middle schools there," said sixth-grader David Paquette.

"We're definitely different," said eighth-grader Taylor Brown.

The Petoskey Middle School robotics team, named Geeks, Gears and Gadgets, or G3, is part of the FIRST Robotics Challenge, usually aimed at ninth- through 12th-grade students. But Petoskey is piloting a middle school program that's running, for this year at least, only in Michigan.

The program steps up the requirements for middle schoolers of similar robotics programs that had taken place in years past.

The Petoskey kids have exceeded even their own expectations for their first experience.

"At the beginning, we all agreed it would be great if we could get the robot to go down the ramp and park, but we achieved more than that, which is exciting," said seventh-grader Thomas Keller.

That's a modest description of the students' robotics season. First, they won first place at the West Michigan FIRST Tech Challenge in Holland. And while they thought the first-place finish meant they automatically qualified for the world championship in St. Louis, Mo., they fell just short of the award that qualified them for worlds.

But they cleaned up at their next competition in Novi on Feb. 23. The kids clinched the prestigious "Inspire" award, and on Tuesday, April 24, they will begin the long trek to St. Louis.

The competition will begin Wednesday morning, and the Petoskey kids will compete against 128 other teams in their category. Their category also includes 13 different countries, including China, India and Russia. All told, 60 countries will be at the championship.

And though it will all end with a competition on Saturday, April 28, the students will have a full sight-seeing trip on their plate, complete with a visit to the St. Louis Arch, the St. Louis Science Center, and a Cardinals game.

But in preparation for that trek, the students had to turn their attention back to their robot.

Their robot was on display Wednesday night at McLean & Eakin, Booksellers in Petoskey as part of a fundraiser for the students' trip to Missouri. The robot's lift, which the students will use to stack crates of racketballs as part of the competition, looks like an accordion. The robot compacts into an 18-inch-per-side cube, but its lift can hoist crates up to nine feet.

"If it goes higher, you get more points. The higher you go, the better," said Taylor.

More than 30 sponsors helped the middle school team reach their travel goal of $11,000, for which the team is grateful, said enrichment coordinator Heather Marvin.

While the students worry about their robot, finessing motors and coaxing a few more inches of lift, Marvin marvels over the way her students have grown over the semester.

"The growth I've seen in them is tremendous," she said. "Not just with math, but the affective areas like team building, team work, problem solving and public speaking. All of that I think is far more important than the competition."

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There are ten Petoskey middle schoolers headed to St. Louis on Tuesday. They are: